Building Corporate Soul

An early edition of this audiobook was provided courtesy of NetGalley and Ascent Audio for review purposes. Your generosity is much appreciated.

This is targeted for a business owners and managers, to build soul in a corporation. Using "Sou System", it explains key components to create a corporate landscape to hire, retain, and develop employees who share shared purposes and pursue the same vision, mission, values and spirit. It also delve into social and environmental responsibilities and motivating community members in ever changing landscape of today. I work in a corporate world and have led a number of business books similar to this book. Similar to many other books, there are case studies of successful companies with unique practices. I liked that this book is up to date for 2022 environment, and offers clear and concise ideas of soul building. I felt this book is better than many others in direct and approachable messages it convey. I think there are charts and graphs, which would be better grasped in a printed or Ebook format. Also, there are some sections I wanted to annotate - again, better suited in a different format. Audiobook is well narrated though and would recommend to people short on time, Otherwise I would recommend a printed or Ebook format.
I also felt the book title and cover both unfortunate as they both feel mechanical and cold. There are something not very matching between "corporate" and "soul." Even "building soul" feels somehow unnatural (maybe because I feel soul would be something innate and not to be built) and I don't feel best suited for this informative and helpful book. Despite these factors, I felt the book was very good in conveying the overarching message. I would recommend this book to my colleagues and corporate warriors.

I’m happy to see that there are books coming out which address organizational management during the CoVid-19 pandemic, as we finally get a chance to find out how crisis were dealt with in the private sector and what lessons learned will have a lasting impact in the years to come. The book is full of good references to studies performed on organizational culture predating CoVid times, as well as how they were maintained or improved in the last 2-3 years. My favourite case study was about Airbnb and how the company’s management dealt with their massive layoff from 2020. Despite all the valuable information presented in this audiobook, I felt disengaged whenever the narrator was reading lines after lines of data from charts. This listening experience would have been perfect without this last part.

Special thanks to NetGalley, Greenleaf Audiobooks, Ascent Audio, and the author for giving me the opportunity to review the ARC in audiobook format and to you, my reader, for taking the time to read this honest personal book review.

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The basic content and direction of the book is very strong. There is a message here that cannot be stated enough. My struggle was with the audiobook. There are much more concise and engaging ways to share the tables and lists. To read an entire graph or list along with the statistics is too much. Also, when discussing something like the social media post of outgoing execs it would be best to share some relevant pieces and not the entire post. These long readings of content outside the message made it hard to connect with the book even though I was connected to the message. I’m hoping this is received more as feedback than criticism as the message is great.